Collaborative Funds

LIFT: Labor Innovations for the 21st Century
The LIFT Fund seeks to bolster and advance the movement for workers’ rights, good jobs, and a fair economy in the 21st century. A project of the Solidago Foundation, the LIFT Fund is a first-of-its-kind partnership between labor unions, foundations, non-union worker centers, and academia. The LIFT Fund seeks to deepen alignment between unions, philanthropy, academia, and worker centers, to create the strategic collaborations needed for the emergence of innovative solutions to build a 21st century labor movement.

The Workers Lab: Innovating for Worker Justice
The Workers Lab is an accelerator that invests in entrepreneurs, community organizers, technologists, economic justice organizations, issue campaigns, and businesses to create scalable and self-sustaining solutions that improve conditions for low-wage workers.
Responding to the deep crisis facing American workers, the Workers Lab provides financial resources, training, and technical assistance to:
•Achieve the necessary power to raise wages and standards for working people,
•Achieve sufficient scale to impact workers across sectors, industries, and geographies, and
•Achieve self-sufficient revenue models that are adequate to allow the models to sustain themselves in the long run.
In its first year of operations, it funded organizations that experimented with new business models for lifting workers’ wages, increased workplace protections, and lifted worker voice. The Workers Lab also held space for a national dialogue on how workers can exercise power in the new economy.

PVGrows
PVGrows is a collaborative network dedicated to enhancing the ecological and economic sustainability and vitality of the Massachusetts Pioneer Valley food system. The PVGrows Investment Fund offers an investment vehicle for individuals, institutions and foundations to invest in building a healthier food system in the Pioneer Valley. It is administered by the Franklin County Community Development Corporation and grew from the work of the PVGrows Network. Solidago Foundation hosts a portion of the funder collaborative dedicated to supporting the PVGrows Investment Fund.

Criminal Justice Initiative
The Criminal Justice Initiative (CJI) is a cross-class funding collaborative of community organizers and activist donors working together, hosted at the Solidago Foundation. CJI’s mission is to end Mass Criminalization and Mass Incarceration in the United States by building and strengthening the infrastructure of the grassroots criminal justice movement. CJI funds where the movement is developing, shifting and growing — work that uproots the systems that harm and perpetuate injustice while sewing community-defined justice healing, atonement, kinship, creativity, and love in its place. CJI funds organizations led by those most impacted by the injustices of the current system, working in alliances across race, class, faith, gender, gender identity, sexuality, immigration status and age.

Massachusetts Solidarity Economy Initiative
The Massachusetts Solidarity Economy Initiative is an initiative developed by Access Strategies Fund, Boston Impact Initiative, the Center for Economic Democracy and the Solidago Foundation. As a grassroots “new economics” innovation lab, MA SEI focuses resources, technical assistance and infrastructure for frontline organizations to develop movement building strategies to transform American capitalism as a root cause of social and ecological injustice. MA SEI formed from recognition that more time and energy needs to be devoted by grassroots, constituent based organizations to develop analysis, vision, and leadership for long-term economic transformation. Leading Massachusetts movement groups are evolving the field beyond traditional issue based campaign organizing, by seeding new worker co-ops, creating land trusts, practicing participatory budgeting, and fighting for transformative public policies. MA SEI funds organizations to allocate staff time and support leaders to grow internal capacity to generate more ambitious, long term organizing strategies for the grassroots sector.

Democratizing Capital East Bay
Democratizing Capital East Bay is a program developed by the Solidago Foundation in partnership with the Common Counsel Foundation and The California Endowment. DCEB creates a collaborative table with leading grassroots organizations in Oakland, California with funding partners, financial institutions and entrepreneurs and local enterprises to support a just transition to a “new economy”. DCEB was formed to support grassroots communities in the East Bay to govern a professionally managed community capital fund that supports local enterprises through patient and flexible capital to meet social justice standards. This program also supports grassroots organizations to link these financial tools with community organizing and political education to advance a progressive economic agenda. DCEB is centered in principles of localism, supporting historically disadvantaged communities, promoting just workplace and environmental practices, and facilitating political power for those who have had less of it.